Ziggy Shipper: Holocaust Survivor

Instead of having a medicinal chemistry lecture today we got to listen to Ziggy Shipper tell us about his life as a Polish Jew during World War 2, how he managed to escape to the United Kingdom to survive the Holocaust from the grip of Germany during the 1940s.

His overall message was not to hate, for there is no reason to hate somebody. He doesn’t hate the Germans, for it was not their crime but their grandparents. He spoke for an hour and a half and it literally felt like five minutes because it was so interesting.

One regret that he mentioned was that he had was not being able to thank his grandmother for bringing him up as they got separated in the concentration camps and she sadly died the day her camp was liberated never seeing freedom. He said he wished he had a chance to thank her for bring him up, and that he was the man he was because of her.

The whole talk was very interesting for me personally as growing up in Australia meant that I didn’t get to learn very much about the European side of WW2 at all. Seeing Ziggy talk from personal experience was fascinating, and seeing him in person really brought it home much more than I’d ever learnt at school from books.